Via Breitbart:

Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the Al-Qaeda number two, in a video posted on the Internet reportedly called US President George W Bush a liar who had "failed in his war against Al-Qaeda."
The Qatar-based Arabic-language satellite station Al-Jazeera said that in the video, "Zawahiri called Bush a liar and said he had failed in his war against Al-Qaeda."

On Thursday, Islamist websites on the Internet had said there would be a new video message posted by Zawahiri entitled " Bush, the pope, Darfur and the Crusades."

The comments, made in a video filmed under generator power deep in a guano-covered cave, were deemed to be authentic.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:18 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Disgusting:

Saying he was "deeply sorry," Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) resigned from Congress today, hours after ABC News questioned him about sexually explicit internet messages with current and former congressional pages under the age of 18.

A spokesman for Foley, the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, said the congressman submitted his resignation in a letter late this afternoon to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

Get that last bit? He was the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

I hope that someone in law enforcement in both Washington and Florida is smart enough to get a search warrant for his House and home personal computers.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:49 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Nope, not another lame Eric Muller/Wonkette/Gawker Photoshopping smear, but an interview of Connecticut's Senator Joe Lieberman by Pajamas Media's own Roger Simon.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:37 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Are they with us, or with the terrorists?

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I've never had much respect for UNC Law professor Eric L. Muller and now that he has attempted what I assert is visual libel--falsely attributing a photo of one person as being someone else--I have even less.

Muller has a long-standing and quite unhealthy fascination with conservative blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin, and this morning, Muller leveled a charge of hypocrisy against her in this post:

In today's column, Michelle Malkin asks, "Where Have All the Good Girls Gone?"

It's a verbal assault on some twenty-year-old TV personality in Great Britain who "once possessed an uncommon sense of modesty and decorum in the skin-baring age of Britney Spears," and liked to spend her time singing "Blessed Jesus" and clutching "a rosary blessed by the pope," but has now become "the new face of skankdom," a "half-naked" "pop tart" who sums up all that is evil in our new world of "sexpot dolls/characters" and "Bratz babies in thongs." A woman who has gone from "pure-hearted to pure crap," and who, among other horrible things, "drinks" and "parties."

With no further ado, I give you: Michelle Malkin, Spring Break, March 27, 1992. Could that be an all-you-can-drink wristband?

Here, incidentally, is the flickr page where the photo appears. Somebody forwarded it to me a couple of months ago. I chortled. Then I forgot about it -- until today, that is, when her vicious hatchet job on a "half-naked" twenty-year-old "skank" brought it to mind.

Mind you: there's nothing wrong with trips to the beach during college, or all-you-can-drink wristbands, or bikinis.

Just with hypocrisy.

The column stands or falls on its own merits, but Muller's accusation--a link to a trashy, "Girls Gone Wild" themed picture--is serious stuff. Muller says the photo is Malkin.

It isn't.

It is a horribly done Photoshop edit, featuring a shrunken headshot of Malkin poorly imposed in the wrong scale over someone else's body. It is such an obvious fakery one has to assume Muller knew it was faked, but pressed on with what in my mind constitutes something akin to visual libel, presenting a obvious forgery as legitimate.

Gawker Media, which owns Wonkette, is familiar with blogs and so much know just how easy it is to badly fake a Photoshop, and so it was a surprise when, they, too joined Muller in presenting the fake photo as fact.

Malkin is rightfully outraged at the attack, and she should be.

Eric Muller's unhinged obsession has gone far over the line, and I hope that he is called to account for his actions. Malkin does not deserve this, nor does North Carolina's flagship university.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:08 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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The always-excellent Lorie Byrd has a column up at Townhall.com hammering Democrats on their dismal national security record. The criticism of what President Bush referred to last night as the "party of cut and run" is well-warranted based, upon a long record of many leading Democrats ignoring, miscasting, and quite possibly "misunderestimating" the very nature and the extent of the threat of Islamic extremism. Not only are the liberal's misconceptions about the jihadist threat dangerous to Westerners, it is also dangerous to Islam itself, ignoring that by refusing to confront Islamic terrorism head on, they may be allowing terrorists to stigmatize over one billion of their co-religionists who are non-violent.

Lorie's column liberally—uh, conservatively—quotes from a post I wrote earlier in the week, Legacy of Lies.

Lorie, who also blogs at Wizbang!, and fellow Townhall.com-er Mary Katherine will be co-panelists with me and many other talented bloggers at the Carolina FreedomNet 2006 blog conference in Greensboro, NC next Saturday.

We hope to see you there.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:49 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I used to enjoy reading Dean Esmay's blog from time to time, and I can't remember when or why I stopped dropping by. Maybe it was becuase of rants like this.

Quite simply, the attack Esmay levels against Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, and Little Green Footballs is not based in any reality I'm familiar with. All three of these blogs do frequently comment on Islamic terrorism, but they also highlight reform-minded moderate Muslims as well. To state, as Dean has, that these blogs are anti-Muslim is quite simply a falsehood.

I don't know if Esmay is pruposefully lying for some reason, or if he has simply gotten so wrapped up in his interpretation of what he thinks people say that he can't tell what they actually say. In any event, his factless rant and his outbursts of of overwrought emotional violence against his commentors is quite sad. It's rare to see a blogger so publicly implode.

All three blog's Esmay attacked have posted rebuttals.

Michelle Malkin

Hot Air

Little Green Footballs

I hope Dean enjoys the burst of traffic. Odds are that once the dust settles, he will have lost both respect and readers.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:13 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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I wonder what the rest of the Arab world must make of this:

Earlier this week, Israeli press reports suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met recently with a senior official in the Saudi government, maybe even with the Saudi king.

Olmert denied the reports but praised the Saudis for standing up against Hizballah in recent weeks. The Saudi government also dismissed reports of the meeting as a "fabrication." But other media reports persisted in suggesting that some contacts between Israeli and Saudi officials had taken place.

Whether or not the contacts took place, Saudi Arabia and Israel undoubtedly have a mutual interest -- Iran, said Dr. Guy Bechor from the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

Saudi Arabia, a majority Sunni Muslim country, is concerned about the strengthening of ties between Shi'ite Muslims in Iran and Iraq and with Hizballah in Lebanon, said Bechor.

Iran has so far resisted international pressure to suspend its nuclear program, which Western states believe is intended to produce atomic weapons -- something that Iran denies.

"[The Saudis fear that] if there is some type of attack against Iran from the West, Iran will hit Saudi Arabia," said Bechor in a telephone interview.

Saudi Arabia is looking for friends and connections in the region and is working to create a Sunni alliance together with Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, and that anti-terror alliance could secretly include Israel, said Bechor.

The world seems to think that only the United States and Israel are likely to forcefully oppose Iran's apparent desire for nuclear weapons, but if the Saudi government forms ties with Israel over their joint concerns about Iranian intentions, then the dynamics we assumed about the pending conflict have the possibility to radically change.

The hope is that political pressure can be brought to bear to convince Iran that an attempt to develop nuclear weapons is not in their best interests. If a political settlement is unreachable, the shift them focuses to when Iran may face military action, and by whom.

Today Israel reiterated a position held by U.S. President George W. Bush that Iran would not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, and if Saudi Arabia can be counted upon for either passive or active support in military operations, the likelihood of political and military success in the wake of a pre-emptive strike increases dramatically.

If Saudi Arabia offers "passive" military aide by allowing Israeli strike aircraft to fly through and refuel in Saudi airspace, it would greatly reduce the amount of time IAF strike fights would have to spend in hostile air space, and enable Israeli aircraft to carry more munitions deeper into Iranian territory.

If Saudi Arabia offers active military assistance, particularly air power, then the situation could arise where a joint mission flown by the two most advanced air forces in the Middle East could put hundreds of strike aircraft over Iran, conceivably wrecking much of Iran's nuclear infrastructure without any direct involvement by American military forces at all. It is also worth mentioning that a joint strike conducted by regional powers instead of Western militaries, it would also be far more successful politically.

It seems unlikely that such a joint mission, or a multi-nation alliance mission is in the works, but the possibility will greatly complicate Iranian plans.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:29 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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The New York Times has issued forth a typically hysterical editorial attacking the anti-terrorism legislation passed by the House yesterday on a vote of line 253-168. The Senate will likely pass their version of the bill today, and President Bush will likely sign the measure into law by the weekend.

I rarely read the Times anymore, especially their editorials, but from time to time, their hyperbole-filled missives are worth the read, if for no other reason than to try to understand just how out of touch the "liberal elite" is with mainstream Americans.

The Times editorial begins:

Here's what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans' fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Hmmmm... the "mindless politics of a midterm election." I wonder, does this ever apply to Democratic-led Congresses, or only Republican-led ones? I think we know the answer.

But here's the gem:

...The Bush administration uses Republicans' fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists.

I'd like for the Times to go out of their way for once and try to apply a little logic and reason, and—God forbid, facts—to support their contention that the legislation will make American soldiers "less safe." The truth the Times and its liberal supporters refuse to confront is that our enemies in this war against Islamic terrorism do not now, nor have they ever, followed any civilized notion of how to conduct warfare against military or civilian targets, and when they have been able to capture American soldiers, they have tortured, mutilated and beheaded them.

Perhaps Bill Keller and company should search their own archives:

The American military said today that it had found the remains of what appears to be the two American soldiers captured by insurgents last week in an ambush south of the capital, and a senior Iraqi military official said the two men had been "brutally tortured."

An American military official in Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that both bodies showed evidence of "severe trauma" and that they could not be conclusively identified. Insurgents had planted "numerous" bombs along the road leading to the bodies, and around the bodies themselves, the official said, slowing the retrieval of the Americans by 12 hours.

[snip]

General Caldwell declined to speak in detail about the physical condition of those who had been found, but said that the cause of death could not be determined. He said the remains of the men would be sent to the United States for DNA testing to determine definitively their identities. That seemed to suggest that the two Americans had been wounded or mutilated beyond recognition.

"We couldn't identify them," the American military official in Baghdad said.

Neither Mr. Keller nor his liberal supporters in the blogosphere seem to have anything approaching a reasoned response as to how this legislation will make the native barbarity of our enemies any more depraved than it already is. Perhaps the Times thinks they'll use dull knifes for beheading instead of sharp ones. The simple fact remains that no law we pass will affect how terrorists treat captured soldiers. They will brutally torture and kill any soldier they capture after this legislation becomes law, just as they did before.

As for the "lasting damage" the Times shrieks will occur, I notice they didn't try to provide specific details. Fortunately for the Times, hyperbole doesn't rely on factual support, as history shows that past wartime Democratic Presidents have done far more damage to the Constitution than measures our present Administration would even consider.

During World War I, Woodrow Wilson pushed through the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, cruelly slapping aside the notion that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" embraced by today's defeatists. Heavy media censorship, the crushing of free speech about the war (at least for those that dissented) and even imprisoning former Presidential candidates was par for the course for Wilson's wartime Presidency.

Bush, in stark contrast, has not made any attempt to muzzle the press, even to the point of allowing classified document leaks to news agencies like the Times without shutting the paper down or putting so much as a single reporter in jail.

The hyperbole continues:

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That's pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush's shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.

It may come as a shock to the editors of the Times, but Democrats themselves have made themselves look soft on terrorism long before this legislation came around.

The party of "defeat and retreat" features leadership that wants to force the American military into a headlong withdrawal from Iraq, genocidally ignoring the fact that such an act would destabilize the fledgling democracy even worse, possibly leading today's sectarian violence to denigrate into full-scale genocide. John Murtha has yet to explain how withdrawing thousands of miles away to Okinawa will make the streets of Baghdad any safer. Ned Lamont has yet to explain how shifting our forces away from the central front of the war on Terror in Iraq and the terrorist forces assembled there will make America safer. The Fringe Left is far more interested in loosing Iraq to make the Bush Administration look bad than combating terrorism. Their only plan is withdrawal and defeat. Democrats look soft on terrorism because they are soft on terrorism as shown by their own actions, not the actions of any other group.

The screed goes on:

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

This may come as a shock to the Times, but the legislation passed by the House does not reinterpret the murky language of the Geneva Conventions, and in fact, does just the opposite: it clarifies and delineates a clear policy of what constitutes legal interrogation methods. The United States have never before attempted to clearly define how U.S. law should meet Geneva's standards, even though it should have done so when the standard was agreed to in 1929. What upsets the Times and many on the left is that this legislation strips them of their ability to label anything and every interrogation technique they don't like as torture.

The Times Hyperbole Drive (unrelated to the Hitchhiker's Improbability Drive, and far less coherent) then kicks into overdrive as they kick out an unsupported list of possible abuses:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The President patently does not have this power. The House bill's language states that a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another tribunal will determine if someone is to be classified as an enemy combatant, not the President. The Times goes beyond hyperbole and delivers a falsification.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there's no requirement that this list be published

As I stated previously, the legislation passed by the House does not reinterpret the murky language of the Geneva Conventions, and in fact, does just the opposite: it clarifies and delineates a clear policy of what constitutes legal interrogation methods. The Congress should have passed this legislation, or something like it, prior to World War II.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Congress has the power to say that foreign terrorists are not entitled to the rights of American citizenship, and they have done so, much to the chagrin of those who would coddle them.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Again, more hyperbole based upon an outright falsification. President Bush does not determine the status of a captured terrorist; a Combatant Status Review Tribunal made up of military judges makes that determination.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

The Times does a masterful job of spinning the actual language of the legislation, which stipulates that coerced evidence could only be used if certain conditions were met. Among those conditions are that "totality of the circumstances renders the statement reliable," meaning that other information must support to coerced information. If a detainee confesses under interrogation to a bomb plot and no evidence can be found to support the admission, his confession cannot be used as evidence. Again, President Bush does not make any determinations whatsoever, the language of the bill explicitly delegates that power to the judge.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Of course, the Times is referring to American civil and criminal law, which follows a somewhat different set of rules than the military criminal justice system. With the conviction of terrorist-supporting lawyer Lynne Stewart, an ugly truth already known by many in the legal and intelligence communities was shown to the world; not only were terrorists using confidential lawyer-client letters to smuggle information to one another, they also discovered that some activist lawyers actively participated. The decision to allow some secret evidence and testimony to protect the lives of sources and intelligence operatives is a reasonable one. Apparently, the Times would rather a defendant learn the source of the information so that he could pass it along to others so that the sources could be eliminated. That the source is quite likely to be tortured before being murdered is not apparently a concern of the Times.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

Of course the definition is unacceptably narrow for the Times. As I stated previously, the Congress, by finally defining terrorism, strips the ability of the Times to label anything and everything it wants as torture. The Times loses a rhetorical tool, and that seems to be their primary concern. The assertion made by the Times that "the bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture" is unconscionable, and a willful distortion of the bill's language and reality. There are literally millions of things the legislation didn't address—the price of tea in China, how long a detainee's hair may be, or if he's allowed to watch The View—but that does not translate into an acceptance or denial of a practice covered under other laws. The bill also refused to stipulate that the detainees cannot be assaulted by wookies or unicorns, so I'm certain the Times will address the oppression of terrorists by fictional beings in their next missive.

The Times finishes with a call to action for Democrats to filibuster the bill, which patently won't happen. Democrats may not like giving America the tools to fight terrorism, but unlike the Times, they are occasionally forced to interact with reality.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:20 AM | Comments (48) | Add Comment
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This is interesting:

After exhausting all leads in the murder case of Janet Abaroa, Durham police homicide investigators are turning to a famed psychic for help.

Lead homicide investigator Jack Cates confirmed Wednesday that investigator S.W. Vaughan has begun using a psychic to assist in developing leads in the 17-month-old probe into the stabbing death of the 25-year-old wife and mother.

Raven Abaroa reported discovering his wife's body in the couple's Ferrand Drive home on April 26, 2005. The murder weapon was never recovered, and while police would not say if there were signs of forced entry into the home, they said they believed the murder "was not a random act."

Cates would not confirm the identity of the psychic, but a source with knowledge of the case told The Herald-Sun that high-profile psychic Laurie McQuary of Lake Oswego, Ore.-based Management by Intuition, had stepped in to help develop leads.

I'm ambivalent on whether or not people have psychic abilities, but when a case goes cold as this one apparently has, any extra set of eyes reviewing the information accumulated so far has to help. I'll be interested to see if this results in new leads.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A letter (PDF) found in the rubble of the safehouse in which al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was killed seems to dispute some of the dire conclusions reached in the leaked excerpts of the National Intelligence Estimate as published by the New York Times and Washington Post last week.

The captured letter sheds new light on the friction between al-Qa`ida's senior leadership and al-Qa`ida's commanders in Iraq over the appropriate use of violence. The identity of the letter's author, “`Atiyah,” is unknown, but based on the contents of the letter he seems to be a highly placed al-Qa`ida leader who fought in Algeria in the early 1990s. `Atiyah's letter echoes many of the themes found in the October 2005 letter written to Zarqawi by al-Qa`ida's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri; indeed, it goes so far as to explicitly confirm the authenticity of that earlier letter. `Atiyah's admonitions in this letter, like those of Zawahiri in his letter to Zarqawi, also dovetail with other publicly available texts by al-Qa`ida strategists.

Although `Atiyah praises Zarqawi's military success against coalition forces in Iraq, he is most concerned with Zarqawi's failure to understand al-Qa`ida's broader strategic objective: attracting mass support among the wider Sunni Muslim community. `Atiyah reminds Zarqawi that military actions must be subservient to al-Qa`ida's long-term political goals. Zarqawi's use of violence against popular Sunni leaders, according to `Atiyah, is undermining al-Qa`ida's ability to win the “hearts of the people.” 2

According to `Atiyah, Zarqawi's widening scope of operations, culminating with the November 2005 hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, has alienated fellow Sunnis and reduced support for the global al-Qa`ida movement. In this vein, `Atiyah instructs Zarqawi to avoid killing popular Iraqi Sunni leaders because such actions alienate the very populations that al-Qa`ida seeks to attract to its cause.3 `Atiyah also encourages Zarqawi to forge strategic relationships with moderate Sunnis, particularly tribal and religious leaders, even if these leaders do not accept Zarqawi's religious positions.

`Atiyah instructs Zarqawi to follow orders from Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri on major strategic issues, such as initiating a war against Shiites; undertaking large-scale operations; or operating outside of Iraq. `Atiyah goes on to criticize Zarqawi's board of advisors in Iraq for their lack of adequate political and religious expertise, and he warns Zarqawi against the sin of arrogance. Because al-Qa`ida is in what `Atiyah calls a “stage of weakness,” `Atiyah urges Zarqawi to seek counsel from wiser men in Iraq— implying that there might be someone more qualified than Zarqawi to command al-Qa`ida operations in Iraq.

`Atiyah closes with a request that Zarqawi send a messenger to “Waziristan” (likely, Waziristan, Pakistan) in order to establish a reliable line of communication with Bin Laden and Zawahiri. `Atiyah confirms in the letter that al-Qa`ida's overall communications network has been severely disrupted and complains specifically that sending communications to Zarqawi from outside of Iraq remains difficult. Interestingly, he explains how Zarqawi might use jihadi discussion forums to communicate with al-Qa`ida leadership in Waziristan.

According to this captured document:

• Zarqawi had failed to understand and execute al Qaeda's broader strategic objectives, and instead had alienated fellow Sunnis from al Qaeda, reducing their support of the terror organization.
  
• Zarqawi group did not have "adequate political and religious expertise" and was "in a stage of weakness."
  
• al Qaeda's communications lines have been severely disrupted.
  

The al Qaeda letter shows a terrorist group that does not seem to feel it is winning. This seems to be very much in contrast to the version of events as published in the Post's article, where it is claimed that "the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position."

Note that the Post article does not seem to cast a critical eye toward this NIE, even though in the same article, it points out that all of the conclusion in the 2002 NIE "turned out to be false."

I suppose it is possible that both al Qaeda and the United States could be facing concurrent setbacks, but it appears to me that our leader isn't hiding in a mountain cave, nor in any immediate threat of being killed by a missile-equipped drone high overhead.

If I am to believe either document, I think the captured al Qaeda document shows the true situation on the ground far more accurately, as bad as that may be for the media and Democratic Party view.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:55 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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CNN is currently running with the following headline:

White House refuses to release full terror report

The opening text follows below:

The White House refused Wednesday to release in full a previously secret intelligence assessment that depicts a growing terrorist threat and has fueled the election-season fight over the Iraq war.

Press secretary Tony Snow said releasing the full report, portions of which President Bush declassified on Tuesday, would jeopardize the lives of agents who gathered the information.

"We don't want to put people's lives at risk," Snow told a White House news briefing.

How about we try on some alternative headlines CNN could have run?

White House refuses to endanger intelligence operatives

White House refuses to expose U.S. intelligence methods to the media

Bush Administration insists on keeping CIA agents alive

Snow: '"We don't want to put people's lives at risk'

I guess it's simply a matter of perspective and goals.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:43 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The Clintons, the Media, and the WMD Attack On America They Refused to Tell You About

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has jumped into the controversy over Bill Clinton's hissy fit this past Sunday, stating that Clinton likely went into the interview predetermined to pick a fight:

"I think that as the most experienced professional in the Democratic Party, he didn't walk onto that set and suddenly get upset," Gingrich said. "He probably decided in advance he was going to pick a fight with Chris Wallace."

This, Gingrich said, may have been a good strategy.

"I think as a calculated political decision, it's reasonably smart," he said.

Perhaps Clinton did calculate his response, but I don't know that by casting a light on the common post-/9/11 perception that Clinton obviously didn't do enough to deter terrorism—a perception shared by Osama bin Laden himself—that he calculated wisely.

Senator Clinton attempted to defend her husband yesterday, saying that:

"I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team."

This is a categorical lie, easily disproven.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, financed by al Qaeda's Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was the first—and to date only—WMD attack in America by al Qaeda and Iraq-affiliated terrorists.

If you have never heard this before, it is because the Clinton Administration downplayed the facts of the case, and a compliant and overwhelmingly liberal mainstream media still refuses to deliver the facts to the America people.

Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti-born al Qaeda terrorist using an Iraqi passport, concocted a plan to detonate a large ammonium nitrate bomb in the basement-level parking decks of WTC 1. The primary intent was to have the foundation of Tower 1 compromised, toppling it into WTC 2, bringing both buildings down and killing as many as possible of the 50,000 people who worked there.

Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi bomb builder who retreated to Iraq after the attack and lived under Saddam Hussein's protection and with his financial support until the 2003 invasion (just ignore the explicit al Qaeda-Iraq link), created a massive 1,310 lb bomb.

Answers.com has the details about this bomb, which was not a conventional car bomb as we have often been led to believe, but a complex IED and chemical weapon (my bold):

Yousef was assisted by Iraqi bomb maker Abdul Rahman Yasin [1] . Yasin's complex 1310 lb (600 kg) bomb was made of urea pellets, nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, aluminum azide, magnesium azide, and bottled hydrogen. He added sodium cyanide to the mix as the vapors could go through the ventilation shafts and elevators of the towers. The van that Yousef used had four 20 ft (6 m) long fuses, all covered in surgical tubing. Yasin calculated that the fuse would trigger the bomb in twelve minutes after he had used a cigarette lighter to light the fuse.
Yousef wanted the smoke to remain in the tower, therefore catching the public eye by smothering people inside. He anticipated Tower One collapsing onto Tower Two after the blast. The materials to build the bomb cost approximately US$300.

Wikipedia, FAS, and many other sources confirm both the use and the intent of this cyanide-laced weapon.

As any fan of spy movies and novels knows, cyanide salts are extremely lethal even in small doses of 100-200 milligrams. Wikipedia provides the effects:

Once more than 100–200 mg of sodium cyanide is consumed, consciousness is lost within one minute, sometimes within 10 seconds, depending on the strength of the body's immunity and the amount of food present in the stomach. After a span of about 45 minutes, the body goes into a state of coma or deep sleep and the person may die within two hours if not treated medically. During this period, convulsions may occur. Death occurs mainly by cardiac arrest.

Yasin's bomb was designed to use both conventional blast mechanisms to attempt to topple the buildings and create a poisonous cyanide cloud to kill anyone inside Tower 1.

As we know, Yasin's bomb failed in both of its goals.

The World Trade Center Towers still stood despite the al Qaeda attack, and the cyanide, instead of being released as a gas as Yasin had designed, was instead vaporized by the explosion. The first chemical weapons attack by al Qaeda on the United States was a dud.

And so when I hear Hillary Clinton state that her husband would have taken the threat of an al Qaeda attack inside the United States "more seriously than history suggests," than the current President did, I have to laugh. Bill Clinton was President of the United States when lower Manhattan was the victim of an al Qaeda plot executed by an Iraqi bomb-builder who detonated a chemical/conventional weapon under tens of thousands of Americans. President Clinton later knew what the bomb was composed of, knew how it was intended to be used, and what threat al Qaeda posed.

Bill Clinton was President for another 7 years, 10 months, 25 days after this attack.

His record of "fighting" terrorism during that time period speaks for itself.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:53 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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It's here (PDF) if you really must read it, but it won't tell you news junkies anything you haven't already figured out for yourselves.

The only question I have is whether or not either the NY Times or Washington Post will admit they were used as dupes in a propaganda effort.

I'm guessing they won't.

Update: From Hugh Hewitt:

The democratic Party and its agenda journalist allies are campaigning for retreat from Iraq, a retreat that would be a decisive victory for the jihadists. Thus any vote for any Congressional Democrat is a vote against victory and a vote for vulnerability.

And that is the conclusion supported by the NIE, touted just 48 hours ago by the left as the key document of this political season.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:50 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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more...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:28 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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An increasingly dyspeptic Matthew Yglesias states that we are now the leading terrorist state:

Consequently, the United States now presents itself as what amounts to the globe's largest and most powerful rogue state -- a nuclear-armed superpower capable of projecting military force to the furthest corners of the earth, acting utterly without legal or moral constraint whenever the president proclaims it necessary.

Please tell me why anyone in America should take people like this seriously. At least Yglesias is honest when he strongly implies he and many other liberals like him are not proud to be Americans. At least he's out of denial.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:20 PM | Comments (30) | Add Comment
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"Do you forget people jumping off the 80th floor or 70th floor when the planes hit them? Can you imagine what it will be for a man or woman to jump from that high?" Karzai asked recalling some of the more shocking scenes from the World Trade Center bombing. "How do we get rid of them? ... Should we wait for them to come and kill us again?"

Thus spoke Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan to the media assembled in the East Room of the White House in a joint press conference held with President George W. Bush this morning.

Sometimes, we do forget, or at least we want to.

It is far easier to try to forget, or try to pretend that it could never happen again, or pretend that it was somehow our fault, and that if we were just nicer or better or different in some little way, that that day wouldn't have occurred. It is a shame that man from half a world away had to visit our nation's capitol and remind some of us of what should be so obvious.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Bill Clinton's attempt at a face-saving, over-the-top response to Chris Wallace during an interview aired on Fox News Sunday has resulted in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responding, saying that much of what Clinton intoned was a lie:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making "flatly false" claims that the Bush administration didn't lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.

Rice hammered Clinton, who leveled his charges in a contentious weekend interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, for his claims that the Bush administration "did not try" to kill Osama bin Laden in the eight months they controlled the White House before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false - and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters.

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice added.

The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton's claim that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice responded during the hourlong session.

Her strong rebuttal was the Bush administration's first response to Clinton's headline-grabbing interview on Fox on Sunday in which he launched into an over-the-top defense of his handling of terrorism - wagging his finger in the air, leaning forward in his chair and getting red-faced, and even attacking Wallace for improper questioning.

I'm relatively sure that much of what the Bush Administration has done regarding terrorism in the months prior to 9/11 remains classified, and so it is difficult to say with any certainty what steps the Administration may have been taking. I would have hoped that among the first steps of the Administration on the subject after taking office would have been to start revamping the human intelligence effort that Clinton gutted in his eight years in office.

Why did Clinton gut American surveillance? Look to the Donkey:

In the past twenty years, there have been at least two high-profile incidents involving leaks. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont was forced to resign from the Senate Intelligence Committee after being tied to a series of leaks in the 1980s. Congressman (later Senator) Robert Torricelli revealed secret information acquired by virtue of his position on the House Intelligence Committee. The information involved a source in Guatemala who had been allegedly been involved in a murder at the behest of then-girlfriend Bianca Jagger. The resulting scandal caused a Clinton Administration “human rights scrub” of human intelligence assets who had been alleged to have connections with criminals or terrorists. Of course, the “human rights scrub” placed the very people who would know about the activities of terrorists and other bad guys off limits to the CIA.

In short, Bill Clinton, embarrassed by Democrats leaking top secret information to the press, decided that instead of cracking down on Democrats, that the best thing to do was to sever the CIA's contact with the very people who would be in the best position to give us information about terrorist activity.

This of course, is the same Bill Clinton that invited terrorist leader Yasser Arafat to the White House on numerous occasions and refused to address Iraq's terrorist threat, even though three of the world's most famous terrorists prior to Osama bin Laden—Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and the bomb-builder of the 1993 Word Trade Center attacks Abdul Rahman Yasin—lived as Saddam's guests in Baghdad.

The Clinton Adminstration also downplayed the fact that Yasin's bomb was built as a chemical weapon; an ammonium nitrate bomb laced with sodium cyanide. Yasin hoped that the bomb would disperse a cloud of poisonous cyanide smoke, killing thousands in the tower as it went up through the elevator and ventilation shafts. Fortunately, the cyanide was vaporized by the blast instead of dispersed in the smoke, and the tower was not undermined by the blast as he hoped. If Yasin had been successful in his 1993 attempt, the casualties of the 1993 Trade Center Attack would likely have far eclipsed the casualties of 9/11. The Clinton Administration responded by treating the treating the attack as a matter of criminal law instead of urgent national security.

The pattern continued.

20 were killed and 372 were injured in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The Clinton Administration did not respond. FBI Director Louis Freeh notes that neither Clinton nor Sandy "Pants" Berger wanted to deal with the fact that Iran was behind the attacks. In the remaining years of his Presidency, Clinton did precisely nothing to bring the bombers to justice. Frustrated by the Clinton Adminstration's inaction, Freeh finally contacted former President George H.W. Bush to move the case forward (my bold):

I had learned that he [former President Bush] was about to meet Crown Prince Abdullah on another matter. After fully briefing Mr. Bush on the impasse and faxing him the talking points that I had now been working on for over two years, he personally asked the crown prince to allow FBI agents to interview the detained bombers.

After his Saturday meeting with now-King Abdullah, Mr. Bush called me to say that he made the request, and that the Saudis would be calling me. A few hours later, Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington, asked me to come out to McLean, Va., on Monday to see Crown Prince Abdullah. When I met him with Wyche Fowler, our Saudi ambassador, and FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson, the crown prince was holding my talking points. He told me Mr. Bush had made the request for the FBI, which he granted, and told Prince Bandar to instruct Nayef to arrange for FBI agents to interview the prisoners.

Several weeks later, agents interviewed the co-conspirators. For the first time since the 1996 attack, we obtained direct evidence of Iran's complicity. What Mr. Clinton failed to do for three years was accomplished in minutes by his predecessor.

The Clinton Administration's response? According to Freeh, they buried the evidence collected after a series of "damage control" meetings. It was only after Clinton exited office and President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice got involved that charges were brought forth against the conspirators on June 21, 2001, five years after the attacks, and just four months after President Bush took office.

That pattern continued.

More than 200 were killed and more than 4,000 were wounded in simultaneous 1998 car bomb explosions on the U. S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Clinton responded by firing cruise missiles at the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and at nearly empty al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Physical targets were destroyed, but only 20 terrorists were thought to have been killed, and Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen said that killing bin Laden, "not our design." Legally, a handful of terrorists were captured, tried, and convicted. Many more terrorists associated with the plot remained free.

Clinton's most robust response to terrorism was still ineffective.

Five months before Clinton left office, 17 sailors were killed and 39 were wounded when the U.S.S. Cole was hit by an al Qaeda suicide boat bomber while refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden. The rules of engagement prevented Cole guards from firing upon the approaching vessels without direct order from senior officers. According to Wikipedia:

Petty Officer Jennifer Kudrick said that if the sentries had fired on the suicide craft "we would have gotten in more trouble for shooting two foreigners than losing 17 American sailors."

Bill Clinton left office having never paid more than lip service to finding or destroying those behind the attack. On November 2, 2002, an armed Predator drone operated by the CIA killed Abu Ali al-Harithi and five other terrorists traveling with him in Yemen. The bombing's mastermind, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was captured that same month and is currently being held by the United States at an undisclosed location.

Bill Clinton did next to nothing to attack al Qaeda in response to four terrorist attacks on the United States during his eight years in office. That he would feign outrage and falsify excuses for his inaction is to invite the criticism he so richly deserves.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:13 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Another Jihadi leader gets killed:

British forces said they killed a top terrorist leader Monday, identified by Iraqi officials as an al Qaeda leader who had escaped from a U.S. prison in Afghanistan and returned to Iraq.

Omar Farouq was killed in a pre-dawn raid by 250 British troops from the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment on his home in Basra, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, British forces spokesman Maj. Charlie Burbridge said.

Farouq was killed after he opened fire on British soldiers entering his home, Burbridge said.

"We had information that a terrorist of considerable significance was hiding in Basra; as a result of that information we conducted an operation in an attempt to arrest him," Burbridge told The Associated Press by telephone from southern Iraq. "During the attempted arrest Omar Farouq was killed, which is regrettable because we wanted to arrest him."

I'll admit to being easily amused by this "eats, shoots and leaves" phrasing from above:

Omar Farouq was killed in a pre-dawn raid by 250 British troops...

Killed by 250 British soldiers, or killed during a raid conducted by 250 soldiers? The answer is obviously the latter, but the-less-than-perfect sentence construction creates a quick mental image of 250 British soldiers concurrently pouring lead into one hapless jihadi.

And yes, that's good for a smirk.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:28 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I had better things to do over the weekend that listen to Bill Clinton try to defend his record of inaction against al Qaeda, but Patterico took the time to show that once again, Bill Clinton is much more interested in imparting spin to defend his miserable record than accept fault for his failures in defending America from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network of terrorists.

Chris Wallace asked Bill Clinton a very simple, straightforward question of why he didn't do more to get bin Laden, and in response, Clinton accused Wallace of a "conservative hit job."

Mr. Clinton, asking you why you didn't do more is a legitimate question when thousands of people were injured and hundreds killed on attacks against U.S. targets in 1998 and 2000 while you were President.

You admitted you failed, Mr. Clinton. You should have stopped there.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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